


I'm Not Afraid of Flying

by laserlesbian



Category: Re:Roleplay
Genre: Angst, F/F, Family Issues, Feelings, Fluff, Kissing, No one else has named this ship yet so I'm taking matters into my own hands, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Teen Angst, Teen Romance, aka Clara and Curie being useless lesbians at each other, eventually, vitamin C
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 21:54:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29089371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laserlesbian/pseuds/laserlesbian
Summary: Clara and Curie have known each other for some time - first as Shrike and Curie Nuclear, then as friends from school. Once they start spending time together alone, though, something starts to shift. Of course, Clara has her girlfriend already and Curie has all the pressures that come with being a member of the Nuclear family. There's no way anything can happen.Right?
Relationships: Clara Wood/Curie Nuclear, Clara Wood/Selene Rogers





	I'm Not Afraid of Flying

Evening air whipped around Clara’s head, muffled by the seals on her helmet. It was a clear evening and cold, unseasonably so for spring. The suit made it comfortable, though, insulating her against the snap of frost across her chest and heating her a little where the motors for the wings nestled against her back. She was gliding, mostly, lifting herself with a lazy beat every few seconds, drifting with the wind towards the city center. The Promontory was passing beneath her feet, the spires of the tallest buildings rising around her. There was a time, not all that long ago, that this would have terrified her, a time that she would have flinched, reeled and dropped like a stone until she was below rooftop height. Now, tonight, with the lights of the city coming on all around her and the ribbons of traffic snaking past far beneath, she sailed on and rolled lazily, drifting along on her back for a minute before twitching her wings and bringing herself back to level flight. Flying with her team had changed that for her. She didn’t fear the height anymore - now, she saw the potential in it, the chance for speed and the safety of being far above the ordinary troubles of the world.

She didn’t get a chance to enjoy herself like this very often. It was not a good idea to try to sightsee during a superpowered battle over the city, and most of her free time was spoken for by commitments on the ground. But lately, with the end of the school year approaching, she was trying to make more time for herself. More time to read, more time to play, and more time to fly. Always more time to fly. She’d taken to flying on her way to places, too, when she could get away with it. Anything Torchbearer-related was an obvious choice, and she’d started pushing her luck, taking the suit to go to the mall or to visit her friends, ducking into alleys or behind buildings to doff it and fold it into its backpack-portable form.

Tonight, she didn’t have to worry about being found out. Curie had known for a long time, and she promised that there would be somewhere to stash the suit where no one would ask questions. That was all she had said about their plans for the evening. Taken together with the fact that this was the first time the two of them were going to spend social time together outside of the structure offered by school and their other friends, that was a much more frightening prospect than any altitude had ever been.

Whatever Curie had in store, Clara was almost there. She left the Promontory behind, drifting out over the boardwalk and into the outlying neighborhoods of the city core. Checking against a waypoint on her helmet’s newly installed HUD, she started to shed that altitude, spiraling down to ground level at the corner of a street running perpendicular to the main thoroughfare of this neighborhood.

She wheeled into the wind, braked with her wings and landing at nearly a standstill, jogging a few steps to shed the excess momentum as her wings folded down to rest snug against her shoulder blades. The street was busy, Friday night in a neighborhood replete with bars, clubs, and other entertainments. A few people shied away from an obvious super, looking unsure if she was a cape or a cowl, but the flow of foot traffic past her returned to its natural course quickly. Even this was not an uncommon sight in Signal City.

She scanned the street for Curie, but it was far too busy to make out anyone’s face in the light of the street lamps now switching on. She reached up to her helmet to connect her comms to her cell phone and call her friend, but was stopped by a hand that darted out from a shadow in the alley behind her, snagging her wrist and pulling her in.

The talons in her gloves slid out in an instant, instinct taking over where conscious thought failed. The LED strips on her helmet activated in the dim light, and she spun around to look at who had taken hold of her.

“Hey, Shrike.” In the orange glow of the helmet lights, Curie’s smirk gained a strange affect, with just a hint of something else behind the eyes. Was she nervous? Impressed? Clara couldn’t tell.

“Oh. Hi Curie.” The talons slid away with the softest whisper of metal on metal, and she stepped back quickly. “Nice to see you, but next time do you think you could get my attention without jumping me in an alley?” She eyed Curie. “And why are you dressed like that?”

Curie Nuclear, usually the height of her own particular brand of fashion, was wearing ratty blue jeans, sneakers, and a baggy, worn Bayside High hoody. The outfit had the effect of rendering her so deeply nondescript that she stood out against the world around her like a bare lightbulb against a concrete wall. The only sign of her normal flair was a hint of green eyeliner.

“I tend to get… recognized. Around town. Like, a lot. If I want to get any peace, I have to do _this_.” She gestured at herself with one hand, contriving to indicate that this outfit was the lowest insult she could pay herself.

“Hey, I turned up in my suit, so I’m not judging. Anyway, I think you look good!” She’d meant it as a mild morale boost, but she caught Curie restraining a flinch. Her pupils dilated the slightest bit, too, and there went that look again. Clara tucked this away for later, but she probably wouldn't revisit that file. She’d learned some time ago that her preternatural ability to pick up the slightest changes in facial expressions was best ignored. It wasn’t mind reading, but with a little practice it could be the next best thing. And it certainly didn’t make people any less uncomfortable when she occasionally worked out what they were thinking before they did so themselves.

“Well… thanks. Let’s get inside, it’s way too cold out here. How do you stand it in… that.” Curie nodded at the suit.

“Oh, it’s not as skin tight as it looks. There’s some insulation in here, and heating coils for really cold weather. Some of Betsy’s best work, if you ask me. I’m probably warmer than you are!”

“Probably, because I’m freezing.” Curie turned down the alley, walked a few steps, and vanished behind a dumpster.

Clara followed, puzzled until she saw the rusted metal door swinging slowly shut. She ducked through into a hallway lit in dingy red with walls of white painted cinder blocks and a tiled floor that reminded her of the tiles at school whose entire purpose in existing was to hide the dirt. She looked around, nonplussed. “If this is your idea of a fun evening, I have some constructive criticism.”

“No, dummy, this is just the back door. I’m pretty sure we’re not _technically_ supposed to be back here, but it was unlocked and I didn’t feel like having eighty people ogling me as soon as we got out onto the street. Now come on, I’m, like, pretty sure I know where I’m going.”

She did not, as it turned out. After three dead ends, one of which was a bathroom that looked as though it hadn’t been used since the Reagan administration, they found themselves on carpeted floor, the sound of music filtering in from somewhere distant down the warren of hallways.

Clara paused and looked around. “You said there would be somewhere to put the suit, right? I’m not seeing it, so far.”

Curie shrugged and crossed her arms with a slightly hunted look. Or perhaps it was embarrassment. “Look, it’s just a little further, up at the main desk. Hopefully. Just take the suit off here and carry it. Doesn’t it fold up or something?”

Clara grinned under the mask, even though Curie couldn’t see it. “What, I haven’t shown you this trick before?” She pulled off her gloves and removed her helmet, stuffing the gloves into it. For a moment, she caught sight of herself in the reflective face plate. Her hair, growing almost down to her jawline now, was as bad a mess as it usually was coming out of the helmet, and her cheeks were still flushed from the flight over.

Trying to comb the tangles out with one hand, she passed the helmet wordlessly to Curie with the other, then removed her wings and folded them down into their hard-shell backpack form. She wriggled out of the suit top and bottom, folding them into the waiting cavity inside the backpack and extending a hand for the helmet.

It was not forthcoming. Looking over her shoulder, Clara saw that Curie was staring, eyebrows raised and wearing that strange little expression again. “Helmet? Curie?” WIth a slow blink, Curie snapped into motion again, tossing Clara the helmet with what was clearly feigned casualness.

“Yeah, that’s a pretty neat trick. I kinda wondered how you always got in and out so fast.”

Clara finished tucking the helmet into the last bit of free space inside the backpack, then zipped it up and tossed it over her shoulder. “Bets designed it for quick changes. Kind of comes with the whole secret identity deal. Now, are you going to show me why you brought me here or are we going to hang out in this hallway all night? Which, honestly, I’d be down for too.”

Curie rolled her eyes. “Let’s go, you’ll see. You’re gonna kick my ass here.”

Before Clara had time to wonder what that meant, they set off, following the sound of music around a few more corners. The carpet here appeared to have been laid in the mid ‘90s, judging both by wear and tear and by the truly godawful pattern. Moons and planets in many unhappy colors vied for attention with strange, abstract geometric shapes that made Clara uneasy if she looked at them for too long. Here and there, staking their claim to regions of this bizarre solar system, were figures that would seem almost humanoid if they hadn’t been rendered in fuzzy rainbow colors, no two appearing quite alike.

“Is this an arcade?” Clara asked. “Or did someone skin an SCTA bus and carpet a nightclub with it?”

She could almost feel the eye roll through the back of Curie’s head. “It’s the first one. They’re… pretty cool here. They know my whole… deal and they don’t make a thing out of it.”

“So, they’ll hold onto my suit? They’re cool about capes who don’t want to be capes all the time?”

“More like… supers who don’t want to be supers all the time. I’m like, 80% sure that Timberwolf beat me at Galaga here last week.”

Clara’s heart skipped a beat. She wasn’t in a hurry to forget her team’s last encounter with the Pack, even if she’d missed it. “Oh. That kind of place.”

“Relax, I come here all the time. If no one’s going to lay hands on _me_ , you’ll be fine.” Curie paused for a moment. “Besides, if anyone messed with you they’d be in some… trouble.”

“Yeah, even without the suit I think I can still hold my own.” Clara grinned, indulging in a moment of the cockiness she tried to keep out of her head when in the field.

“Yeah… Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

They rounded another corner together and came out into the main body of the arcade. It was large, larger than Clara had expected, with a high stamped-tin ceiling and big plate glass windows at the front, just visible past the machines that crowded the floor. They were near the front desk where a bored-looking young man chatted with a woman who had just come in, counting out tokens into a paper cup as the customer fumbled for her wallet.

“Give me the suit, I’ll take care of it.” Curie tapped her foot, watching the exchange at the desk intently while Clara shrugged off the pack.

She handed it to Curie. “Should I go up with you?”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll get us some tokens and leave this. Jimmy’s cool, he’ll hang onto it. I think.” Clara opened her mouth to question this, but Curie was already gone.

She waited, watching two boys of about middle school age squabbling over the controller for a light gun game. The title of the game marched across the top of the cabinet in blocky red letters against a bullet-riddled concrete background: “HARDPOINT.” Eventually, the taller boy relented and the shorter one began picking off uniformed soldiers on screen with a confidence and lack of coordination borne of someone still getting used to newly too-long limbs.

Curie returned, handing Clara a paper cup heavy with the metal tokens. “Well. Your suit’s taken care of, and I think we’re stocked up. So… where first?” A nervous little smile played on her face, displacing the normal expression of barely contained distaste that she wore whenever she wasn’t fighting or working at a wheel.

Clara looked around the cavernous room, eyeing air hockey tables, skee ball games, and a miniature laser tag arena, and grinned. “Depends… How bad do you want to get beat?”

* * *

Two hours later, well into the evening and the second wave of pedestrians to and from the bars nearby, Shrike and Curie peaked out again from the back door of Wilson’s Arcade. They were giggling, whispering in the dark as they checked for observers in the alley outside. Curie was still incognito, and Shrike had fully donned the mask and suit, but they both felt that caution paid dividends. Besides, it was fun to sneak around for recreational reasons sometimes, in addition to whatever back alley adventures their superpowered lives might entail.

Determining the coast to be clear, Shrike stepped out from behind the dumpster. “Curie, this was a _blast_. I’d love to do this again, thank you for showing me this place.” She reached up with a gloved hand and popped the faceplate off of her helmet to showcase an ear-to-ear grin.

Curie smirked, her standard casual aloofness circling around the edge of the expression but not finding purchase, somehow. “Hey, no problem. I’m… not free super often, you know how it is, but… yeah, I’d like to do this again.” This time, whatever was preying on her mind was too clear for Clara to ignore.

“Curie, I have to ask - Is something wrong?” Clara watched the muscles of Curie’s face tighten, her pupils dilate, heard her pulse quicken, felt the shift in the air as her breath caught slightly. Anxiety, surprise, and - still, something else. For a moment, she was almost swallowed up by guilt over trying to read her friend so forensically, but she pushed it aside. Curie knew her powers, she had probably already figured out that lying to Clara’s face was a difficult game to win if Clara didn’t want her to. Whatever was going on here was worth the attention, and slight invasion of privacy, her powers could provide.

“Yeah… no, I’m fine.” Eyes dart to the left, subtle smell of sweat and adrenaline, pulse speeding up further. A lie. But no need to push the issue. Just because Curie was lying, or at least omitting a truth, that didn’t mean that it was right for Clara to press her for more information.

“Ok, if you say so. I’d just hate to think there was something you needed to talk about and I hadn’t known to ask, y’know?” Clara offered a gloved hand, making sure the talons were safely tucked away, to Curie, palm up. The most reassuring gesture she could think of.

Curie stared at the hand like it was made of raw beef. “Yeah… Thanks. I’ll tell you if I need anything.” Probably sensing that this was inadequate, Curie tried again. “Seriously. I’ll… I’ll let you know if you can do anything to help.”

She lifted a hand halfway, paused for a moment, then completed the motion, laying her left hand gently, almost fearfully, in Clara’s outstretched right. Clara smiled. “There, now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” She gave Curie’s hand a little squeeze, patting it with her free hand. This, at least, elicited a rueful grin from Curie.

“Sure, sure. This was nice. Get home safe, yeah? I’m gonna… take the bus, or something. I don’t want to fly in this.” She plucked at the hoodie.

“Ok! Well, text me when you get there.” Clara popped the face plate back into place and stepped back from Curie, folding her wings open in the narrow alley. She waved and Curie waved back, a little awkwardly. With an invisible grin and a strange sense of levity in the pit of her stomach, Shrike beat her wings and shot up into the night sky, arcing away towards the northern end of the city, and towards home.


End file.
